0:00:01 : Hey, what’s up? Welcome to the Learn Create Grow Podcast. This is Santhosh Shetty here and I am going to be your host. So today you’re going to learn how to leverage the benefits of social proof to grow your business. So you’re going to learn what social proof is and the different benefits of social proof, the different types of social proofs that are there, and how to leverage these social proofs in your website to grow your business as well.

0:00:26 : So before we begin, follow this podcast if you’re looking to grow your business through uncomplicated designing and marketing. And if you like this particular episode, don’t forget to give me a five star rating and leave a comment and also share it with someone who will need it. I’ll really, really appreciate it. All right, so let’s go to the episode. So what is social proof? Let’s look at the definition in Wikipedia. Wikipedia says social proof is a psychological and social phenomenon where people copy the actions of others in choosing how to behave in a given situation.

0:00:58 : Now, whenever you go to Wikipedia, if you want to go in depth into a certain terminology, then that is the place. Now, to help you understand it in simple terms, let’s talk about app that we all use. Amazon is pretty popular. I think pretty much everybody uses Amazon right now when they have to purchase a product. If you’re not, then you might be using some other kind of an app to purchase product. So whatever it is, what do you first do whenever you are going to purchase a product? The first thing that you’re going to do is you’re going to click on the product, look at the reviews, you will go through the positive reviews, you will also go through the negative reviews. What I usually do is I check the negative reviews first to see if there is something common between all these negative reviews out there. So what are we doing when we are doing that? We are looking for social proof, whether this product is good or whether this product is bad.

0:01:54 : Now, based on these reviews, which are written by random people, it might be true, it may not be true, but because a lot of people are talking about it, it can help you or it can influence you into buying that product, or it can influence you into not buying that product. Before you went to purchase that product, you would have been super excited on buying it. But after you check the negative reviews out, you might have changed your decision completely.

0:02:25 : So that is how social proof is and review is just one of the social proof out there. And let’s talk about benefits as well. These are the four benefits, four top benefits, you can say of social proof which can help you grow your business. One is social proofs can help build your credibility and authority in your particular business niche. It can help you increase engagement. Think about this. Whenever you go through any of your social media channels. Let’s say instagram, for example, when you’re scrolling, when you come across a post which may be extremely good and extremely valuable, but if it doesn’t have likes or if somebody has not liked it or somebody has not commented it. There is a very high chance of you not going through that social post or not even reading the caption or the text that is written over there. You might ignore it, right?

0:03:24 : That is a psychological thing. That is what most people will do unless you know the influencer. But think about this similarly. When you’re going through your instagram wall, is it you call it, whatever it is when you’re going through the post, if you come across a post which has, like, lots of engagement, lots of reactions, likes lot of comments that will catch your attention and you might probably have a second look. You might look at the post and if it interests you, you might even read what’s written in caption. Now that is the power of social proof and it can increase engagement that way.

0:04:02 : It also increases visibility. Now, whenever there is a lot of increase, a lot of engagement to any of your posts, video, podcasts, whatever it is, the platform where you have this particular post or your content, the platform, the algorithm itself will pick it up, they will know because there are a lot of engagement on your posts or content, it’s going to get more visibility. This is how it can help boost visibility as well.

0:04:31 : And finally, it can increase your conversion. So if you are somebody who has something to sell, maybe product, maybe a service or maybe a course, it can help you with that as well. It can convert your web traffic, whatever is coming to your social media page or to your website. It can convert that traffic into visitors or traffic into lead. And these leads can be converted sales using social proof saying that so many people have bought your service or bought your product.

0:05:00 : You can say things like that in the lead page, in the landing page, I’m sorry. And whoever has purchased your product, then you can also upgrade and upsell other products and they are going to be your customers for life. So what are the different types of social proofs that are there? Now, if you’re talking about social media itself, there is likes, there are shares, there are relevant comments, there are retweets reactions, recommends, and how many followers you have, how many subscribers you have, how many likes or comments for your video or for your podcast.

0:05:40 : And also reviews, if you are a business and if you have products, any kind of a product or even a course rate, people will look at the reviews that you have like negative reviews, positive reviews and that can influence their decision into purchasing your service, product or your course. And if you have a lot of sales, then you can also showcase your sale. That is another kind of a social proof. And if you have some kind of a community platform or a member platform, then you can showcase the number of members you have, the number of people who have signed up for whatever level or membership plan you have, your upgrades, your upsells, and the different kinds of subscriptions. So these are all different social proof which are there. There are probably many more than that, but this is what which is commonly used on the internet.

0:06:30 : Now how do you leverage all these social proof in your website to do that? There are multiple tools out there depending on what kind of social proof you want to showcase in your website. There are widgets for that. So if you want to showcase your Facebook like shares and Facebook post in your site, then there are widgets which can showcase it and along with the likes and shares it has. So there are widgets for it and even for reviews, right? There is trustPilot, there is capterra.

0:07:02 : I was into hospitality business a few years ago, so we used to use TripAdvisor a lot, even Google reviews. We used to integrate all these things in our property page so that people know the kind of reviews that we had. Now adding multiple widgets can get a little complicated. So that is why there are social proof plugins which are there. There are many plugins. I recently started using a plugin called as Najifi. That is N-U-D-G-I-F-Y-I-F-Y I’ll. Leave the link in the description as well. All right, you can check the features out and you’ll know what are the features this particular social plugin has?

0:07:40 : This plugin is very powerful. You will be able to integrate multiple social proofs in your website as per whatever is relevant for a particular page. And if something is not there, you can always integrate Zapier into nudify and connect anything that you want. Well, that’s about it. I hope this episode helped you understanding what social proof is and the benefits of social proof and the different kinds of social proof that are there.

0:08:08 : All right, if you found this episode useful, don’t forget to hit like and leave a five star rating so that I know that you liked it. And if you want to leave a comment, you can do that and you can share this episode with somebody who would find this useful as well. All important links and all special links are in the description if you want to check it out. If you want to connect with me on social media, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, anywhere, my username is design plans, that is designclans. And if you want to request for any content around designing, entrepreneurship or marketing, you can let me know through my social channels as well. All right, so that’s about it for today. Thank you so much for listening. This is Santhosh Shetty here and have a wonderful day. Bye.